Month: March 2013

The Fate of Google Glass ⇥ theinteractivist.com

Joel Hladcek has arrived from the future with some information about Google Glass:

Nobody bought it.

Oh sure they sold SOME. Ultimately Google Glass got used mostly by very specialized workers who typically operated in solitary and didn’t have to interact with other humans. Of the general public, there were a few geeks, opportunistic future-seekers and silicon valley wannabes, who bought them to keep up with developments or hoping to look as “cool” as Sergey did when he was famously photographed sitting on the subway (some PR guy later admitted that the whole “I’m just a normal guy slumming on the subway looking like some hipster cyborg” thing was just an orchestrated Glass marketing ploy arranged by Google’s PR firm) but they didn’t. That’s because none of those geeks were young, mincingly-manicured-to-appear-casually-hip, billionaires. No. They just looked overtly dorky and as I recall, slightly desperate for the smug rub off that comes with publicly flashing a “cool” new product. But that didn’t happen for them. Quite the opposite.

HTC Explains the Design Philosophy Behind Sense 5 ⇥ blog.htc.com

Drew Bamford, of HTC:

During our research, a few consistent patterns emerged:

  • Most people don’t differentiate between apps and widgets.

  • Widgets aren’t widely used – weather, clock and music are the most used and after that, fewer than 10% of customers use any other widgets.

  • Most of you don’t modify your home screens much. In fact, after the first month of use, approximately 80% of you don’t change your home screens any more.

There are those who insist upon the porting of widgets to iOS, but I’ve never understood their need on the product. It isn’t any more efficient to view email subject lines in a widget, only to have to open the email app to read the whole message.

As I’ve mentioned before, I think HTC’s approach to the home screen is very logical, much like Windows Phone’s live tiles. When you unlock your phone, you’ll be able to see your friend’s recent Facebook posts, and hot news being shared on Twitter. That makes sense (sorry) to me.

On the other hand, Apple doesn’t necessarily need to offer any of these things to be successful. Just because Apple doesn’t redesign its operating system every eighteen months, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t innovating. Maybe — just maybe — many of the metaphors that Apple began using in the very first iterations of iOS are still valid.

Open and Shut ⇥ daringfireball.net

John Gruber, regarding the Tim Wu article in the New Yorker:

I think what Wu and his brethren believe is not that companies win by being “open”, but that they win by offering choices. […]

Where others offer choices, Apple makes decisions. What some of us appreciate is what so rankles the others — that those decisions have so often and consistently been right.

Greenlight’s Einhorn Drops Suit Against Apple Over Preferred Stock Plans ⇥ thenextweb.com

Matthew Panzarino, The Next Web:

Apple removed that item from voting in the meeting after U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan granted a motion to block the vote on ‘Proposal #2′, which would have eliminated preferred stock.

One wonders if that was the entire point of this lawsuit — blocking Proposal 2 — given that Einhorn dropped it just two days after the shareholder meeting. What happens next time Apple proposes dropping preferred stock? Another lawsuit?